Posted
by
Zonk
on Friday February 24, 2006 @06:46PM
from the so-shiny-and-useable dept.

Fennie writes "Designtechnica has published their 2006 Best of Web 2.0 list. Some of the sites include Flickr.com, Vimeo.com and Writeboard.com. From the piece: 'The next generation of the web is here! With new kinds of desktop-like applications being released left and right, how will you know where to go and what to use? That's why we're here: To show you the best of Web 2.0 sites that you can get the most out of. No matter the task, video, audio, or photos, we have a site that works great for what you want to do and uses all the great features of Web 2.0 technology.'"

Total number of these webpages I've ever used.... 1, Google Maps.Total number of these webpages that even remotely serve a need.... 2, Google Maps and maybe Google Local.

And for directions, google is easily beaten by Rand-Mcnally. Only the satelite maps feature gives it a good use.

So whats all the hype for? If I take a photo, I don't want it indexed to the world- I send it to the 2-3 people who might give a shit. Same with video. Back when I used IM (before all my friends stopped using it) I used Trillian to the same effect as they use Meebo, with awesome side features (chat logs). I sure as hell don't want my bookmarks searchable to the world.

Looks more like a set of pop favorites for the under 20 crowd than it does actually useful sites.

I've been forced to use Writeboard as part of our corporate Basecamp installation. It's got to be the least-functional wiki implementation out there, with very few formatting choices, almost no documentation, and slow response time. Oh, but wait, it comes from a sexy Web 2.0 company, so it must be good. There are better wikis (almost all of them), better AJAXified word processors (Writely), better collaborative tools that let you choose between wiki markup and WYSIWYG (JotSpot), so how did this dog get on the list? Perhaps the writers hang out at the same trendy coffeehouses chortling over their Web 2.0 antics...

So what "version" was the web when Java applets became popular? What about frames? What about annoying midi background music? What about inline images?

It's fairly obvious that "Web 2.0" and "blogosphere" and the like are marketing terms. The real questions are: What marketers are coming up with these things, and who's paying them to do it? I'm thinking it's The Carlyle Group, or the Bilderbergers, or the Knights Templar.

I wanted to give you mod points, but I will respond to you instead. (since its an either or proposition, and this stuff interests me.)
30 Boxes really is great, My girlfriend can keep me organized by updating her calender and having it reflect on my own, then using the RSS reader to put it on my google/ig page and its perfect. It needs a lot of work, but its fairly robust already, and advancing quickly. Its nothing revolutionary, just good execution.

There were some of these "2.0" applications I hadn't tried, specifically White board, and Meebo, My first impression of Meebo was... Lackluster at best, its a single editable page, with roughly five formatting codes, and no project management, no spell check, works like giving everyone their own password protected Wiki page. Only reason its "web 2.0" is the theme, rounded edges and shadows and whatnot. A good program would be able to make trees of documents, have many pages, give completion ratings, assign pages to users, mark pages needing further work, revision, fact checking, editing, or any tag you wish, and be able to have users highlight individual tags, (say if your job is to edit, any page needing editing would show up bright red) Link to documents within documents, built in commenting, visible on text on mouse over. Just tons of stuff, This product shouldn't be even considered 1.0 its nowhere near a full product.
Secondly, Meebo.com
Looks really good, feels very good, very responsive, Much better than any of the "2 go" IM projects out there, great interface, feels like your using a real program. Now I just hope this runs on my Nintendo DS when it gets a browser!

Ok, validation isn't everything, and passing the validator is not 100% confirmation that your page is valid, but just for kicks (and to see if the best of web 2.0 passes the basics of web 1.0), let's pass their list through the W3C's HTML Validator and see what we get (links go to the validator results

PhotosFlickr.com [w3.org] - HTML 4.01 Transitional - 15 errors.
No need to use end tags if you don't use a start tag. Meta Keywords...does anyone still pay attention to those?

Maps/DirectionsGoogle Maps [w3.org] - XHTML 1.0 Strict - 101 errors
Google! How could you?!? Of all the sites to use deprecated elements under a Strict declaration! I feel betrayed.

Local DirectoriesGoogle Local [google.com] - Not Found The requested URL/local/ was not found on this server

Chat/IMMeebo [w3.org] - DOCTYPE DECLARATION was not recognized or missing - 2 errors
Come on. That's sooo 1990's. Actually, it gave me a declaration, so perhaps its malformed or they don't give one to robots.

Buzzword Sites - What? Like I could let a name like Design Technica off that easy.Design Technica [w3.org] - This Page is not valid (no Doctype found)! - 38 errors
Ouch! Same story. I see one in the source, but the validator doesn't accept it. Tables

Hmmm...everybody tried xhtml except designtechnica and meebo. Targeting mobile browsers, I guess? Nobody passed. There were a few non-table-based layouts, but that was offset by a lot of use of deprecated elements. It looks like web 2.0 is about as ready as IE 7.